Too Much WoW Hate?

[AsbestosKidney]

I only kept playing for a good while because it was a nice way to chill with some friends, and because I sort of enjoyed the levelling process due to a lot of funny references in quests and some areas of the game looking beautiful in spite of a horribly outdated graphics engine.
My enthusiasm died as the repetition increased in the endgame.

And for all its corny clichés, I kinda liked the original Warcraft universe probably due to a severe case of "I played the original games when I was a kid"-nostalgia.

The idea of main characters within the story getting killed repeatedly in raids makes me die inside. I don't hold a grudge against people who play the game though. If they're having fun doing it, good for them.

What I like about Guild Wars is that A: It's fast-pased, B: character customization is much more flexible and C: it doesn't require as much of my time. Naturally it's a matter of taste..

 

[Magnus Of Weelilplace]

Eudaemonian,

Points heard, and accepted as valid.

I don't think I'll be picking WoW up any time soon, but it doesn't seem so "scruby" to me.

*note*

"scruby" is a Guild Wars PvP term for PvE "scrubs" who run absolutely horrid skill/attribute builds and use retarded combinations because they think they are cool/don't know anything about the game mechanics. My view of WoW was a giant society of people that simply PvE'd and ran whatever skills they used there in PvP as well, because "I t3h ub3r tanq and cannot be destroy'd cuz i r haxorz!!!"

wait...is WoW like that? if so im not interested after all.

 

[Stargoat]

I, like Sapient played wow for ages (for release)and i origionaly started due to my liking to the warcraft story (which is now complete shit
I'm also the kinda gamer who takes things and likes to get the most out of it
so i didnt rush through
Anyway i got to 60 amnd went raiding ect the BC came out
all cool new place new quest
the screwed up by making everything over powererd and making all your old gear usless
and with the addition of getting to 58 so you can go to outland made (mainly) lvls 50-58 extremly boring and unfun to play (instaces were crap because the only people you could find were either around lvl 50-53 so you were to weak, or you got a lvl 70 which just made it boring)
Anyway i quit wow a couple of months ago for many reasons. i got 70 and continuasly grinding for rep wasnt much fun, the removal of massive group raids put me off, and well it was just really really boring. Also i dont like what the did with the new races (i mean all the elves leaving and joining there mortal enemys because of some over zealious commander)
as for the rise or the lich king, they will have to pull some serious crap to fix what they did wrong.

 

[Gauwin]

Magnus

"My view of WoW was a giant society of people that simply PvE'd and ran whatever skills they used there in PvP as well, because "I t3h ub3r tanq and cannot be destroy'd cuz i r haxorz!!!"

No, not at all. If you wish to PVE to the extreme, you need to take on a viale spec on your class, and you need to rework all your gear, over, and over, again. (yes, i mean it.)

You could take the PVP gear to pve, but you would miss a lot of dps/healing status depending on your class, and you could take your pve gear to pvp, but you would be 1shotted due to low amount of stamina and resilience(resilience is a new stat introduced in TBC, that reduces a % of the damage done by a certain critical hit, a % of you being critical striked, and a % of damage taken by Dots (damage overtime spells) , capping at 25% , 5% , 5% respectivetly(lolspelling?)

And the "using the same skills in PVE that in PVP"? Hello no. WoW arenas is all about good Cooldown usage, teams setups, ... you dont CC a boss in a raid do you?

But then again, its my opinion. If you want to learn some more about how complex wow pvp can get, i can suggest a good, enjoyable and fun to watch movie that gives an insight to PVPING as a Mage.

Link: http://files.filefront.com/I+Suck+At+PvPwmv/;7995292;/fileinfo.html

skip the first minute or so if you wanna go right into the pvp section

 

[halbarad]

I myself have clocked over 700 hours on WoW. Around 200 of those hours were honestly spent exploring, socialising and general idleness.
One weekend, during a fortnight of weather that can only be described as horrendous (couldn't leave the house at all) i only left stormwind to travel to Ironforge, Darnassus and Shattrath.

Around 100 hours of my time was spent in raids. With end game content, including Tier 6 gear, i found that the game had lost all appeal. Zul'Aman? Well the simple fact is, it's nothing new. World of Warcraft has hit a brick wall in the fact that until they release the thing AFTER Wrath of the Lich King, i wont have any reason to do anything. The Wrath of the Lich King content will be a new class, buildings in the PVP maps that can be destroyed, which will be same-same after no time. 50% reduction of experience requirements and 50% increase of quest experience from 1-60 (it's not been implimented yet, it will only be implimented with Wrath of the Lich King) which is due to level 80 being released.


Either way, i've sold my world of warcraft account for a nice round £300+. I spent a total of £120 on the game, so i made some money.
My main reason for selling my account is that i was addicted to the game. The amount of time i spent on it was preposterous. I'd come home from college or work, depends on the time we're talking about, then sit in front of my PC with my only meal when i got home. Sandwiches and Whisky. I didn't have time for other games! Nevermind other people.
I'll also admit that i'm not a socialite. I still only go out socializing every so often, more than before, but still a very small amount for my age (19).

On the game though. The fact is, nobody in the world can say that WoW isn't boring. Even i got bored a number of times. I found that for hundreds of hours, i could either farm money or create another character to go through the same rigmarole again, just with a different set of skills which amounted to me still hating 99% of the other people in the game.
The game has infact slaughtered, raped and repeatedly snuck back into the home of the Warcraft story. It has left the story with no place to go but back into the arms of a repeated sex offender. Any chance of Warcraft 4 being new or even being made is so slim that it's almost saddening, as the games were fun - immensely fun! All they can be now is a RTS version of World of Warcraft.

Oh, and on the complexity of PVP, especially arena - not a chance.
An ice mage can be used in the same setup for both PVE and PVP. It's a simple cycle of freeze, blast, freeze, blast. This is always enough to slaughter warriors, rogues and almost any other class. The only classes useful against mages are Hunters and Druids.

Oh, and for PVE damage a warrior can be MS or Dual Wield spec. Reccomended DW. For PVP MS. But, i've both been, and seen others, using either spec in both. One is slightly more successful, but the other still works.
There is hardly any complexity in the game now. Back in the olden times of Pre-Burning crusade, a lot of the game was complex. Now, the game is sadly as complexed as running headlong into a brick wall. Also another reason for me quitting the game - i've mastered every single class in the game.

 

[sapient]

Yes, the game's complexity has dropped a lot since the pre-BC days. Remember when Pat first released a video, and every warrior was creaming themselves to see how much damage they could do? The complexity of the ranked honor system was that not only would you have to efficiently kill in PvP, but also put in a ridiculous amount of time. I remember Rise and Elysiux (to name two HWLs) putting in days, staying up late, sometimes all night, farming honour to keep their tanks up. Elysiux would constantly be tired and frustrated with the game, but he didn't give up and it was an incredibly large chunk of time it took away from his life. When Elysiux hit High Warlord I really realised how much time the game would take pre-BC. And what do you do now? Thirty arena games a week, pick up an MS Warrior and a Paladin and you're good to go until next Tuesday.

WoW has scaled down in challenge and thought (what happened to BWL? The old fights with all of us getting pissed because some prick popped Blade Flurry on Vael?), and I think that's a large part of why so many new players are queueing up. Pre-BC, PvP was respectable (monthlong grinds for The Unstoppable Force, farming long and hard for the bars for an Arcanite Reaper) but still time consuming. I guess Blizzard have reversed both factors and made PvP an absolute joke, and making it so easy that three hours every week can get you S3 if you're already decked in S2 when you start. PvE is piss easy (High King Maulgar was a joke, Blizzard) for starters, and the more you deck yourself out in 10-man epics the easier it gets, as opposed to harder (guilds that can't even communicate properly farming Void Reaver for easy epics? What happened to only pro guilds making it past Molten Core?).

The new influx of players will only cause Blizzard to build on this. We're not all Nihilum/DnT and we can't finish the entire raid content without trying, so Blizzard is setting the mark for a casual player (arena, heroics, badges) but going waaaaaay past that mark and making the game ridiculously easy (Easy 15 badges a day, 3 hours of arena a week). But yes, the game has drastically reduced in depth, and I doubt WOTLK or Sunwell is going to fix that. Remember early TBC? There was such a large flood of new content, everyone wanted to try it. So we did, and when the influx of 70s came 3-4 weeks later, the only new content was a select few instances and heroics, which pretty much gave new meaning to the words "recycle, reskin, reprogram". Every heroic is just a beefed up version of instances you've been through before, and to tell the truth I'm not impressed.

End wall of text, you can go back to ignoring my rants now.

 

[tiredinnuendo]

But what I think we're all forgetting here is this:

Anyone who has long, protracted discussions about elves and orcs and the various merits of each is a loser.

- J

 

[hickwarrior]

But what I think we're all forgetting here is this:

Anyone who has long, protracted discussions about elves and orcs and the various merits of each is a loser.

- J

Err what? Why is that? Don't the RPers like doing that stuff?

Anyway, i feel this thread is beginning to show more WoW-lovers(nothing bad about it, just saying) that all agree with each other... So, time to say, this thread should get locked up.

 

[tiredinnuendo]

Err what? Why is that? Don't the RPers like doing that stuff?

It was intended to be a joke. Apologies if it came off incorrectly.

That said, your bit about "RPers" isn't helping the argument for them not being losers.

- J

 

[McMo0^]

If i'm totally honest i've never played WoW. I've watched people play it, but watchin people play a game and playing it is never the same. WoW looks boring, but thats not the reason i don't play it. I've lost friends to WoW and other pay monthly rpgs. I'll admit i'm a bit of a cs addict, but if theres something goin on round a mates, or a journey to the land of alcohol abuse, i'm game. The friends i know who got addicted to WoW stayed away from such social ventures. The only person i know to have recovered from this addiction lost his job and couldn't afford the net or WoW anymore, and suddenly found himself free. Now with money, flees from WoW related discussions in fear of the spark of addiction returning and his life disappearing. So i don't hate WoW cos of poor gaming features or anything to do with what it is, just what it did to some very close friends.

 

[renahzor]

I've played WoW since just a couple months after release, and to say WoW isnt boring now would be a flat out lie. My play time is pretty Limited now, a couple hours on 2 or 3 days week depending on my mood. Really its turned into a big chat room. I log in to BS with friends and maybe kill a couple monsters or see the newest boss they're working on, and on rare occasion run a raid to see some new gear.

Really the game was very fun on release, but the 1-60 content has been completely abandoned and basically they should just have a 3 month upfront payment and let you start at 60, because all of the lower level content has become nothing more than a big bunch of crap to keep you occupied while you get to 60. WoW was my third MMO, UO and EQ preceeded it but I didnt play either of those for very long. The things that make wow appeal to a vast audience is the same things that make it very boring. Before the expansion I was having a very good time with the game, and after it was just all down hill really. Daily quests(as if it didnt feel enough like a job already) and just the overall sense that they are constantly moving the "carrot" too far.

Basically, I dont hate WoW, but its age is starting to show alot. Ill likely keep an active subscription to keep in touch with friends whie we wait for something different to come along (and honestly, 15 bucks is pretty much nothing for me in the overall picture of things). Theres lots of things "wrong" with the WoW game model, and im hoping in the next few years we'll see MMO's with alot better features and alot more planned out approach to this pay-by-month type gameplay. The problem is, WoW has gotten SO BIG that game producers (and alot of developers) see money signs in the imitation of that flawed model. You can be sure as long as WoW is raking in 8-9M subscriptions a month (about $40M a month), its going to take a creative/brave indy developer to break that mould and come out with something thats truly fun to play and has lasting appeal.

Every time I sit down and play WoW now I constantly say to myself "Hey wouldnt it be awesome if (insert idea here)." I never go "Man, they did that just right, and that was a ton of fun!".

-Ren

 

[Magnus Of Weelilplace]

Gauwin,

I still dont know if WoW pvp will be for me. I haven't watched your video yet, but I know what I like, and I like Skill based pvp.

In Guild Wars you can play PvP for an eternity. In fact, you don't even have to PvE to make a Character for PvP. Right off the bat you can make a lvl 20 Character of any class(that you have access to, the 2nd two games brought on 2 new classes and if you don't own them, you cant play as them) that starts with a set of skills, including one FREE elite skill (just a skill that is better than others, only 1 on your bar at a time) and enough other crap to fill your 8 slot bar and begin to earn faction(points) to unlock more skills, armor(all of a short list of styles, but functional) weapons(same as armor), and runes/insignias to modify that armor.

ALL of this can be done without ever touching the storyline once! Now, saying that, your style is limited, and your choices of places to go with these characters is even more so limited since you can only be present in PvP areas. Which is just a small group of islands called the "Battle Isle's". But my point isn't that you can never touch the storyline, but that at any point in time if my team needs...lets say a flagger for a GvG. They want, a Ritualist/Dervish(in GW Primary+secondary classes rock ) with blah blah blah on its skill bar. I've never made a PvE Rit, but I know how to run one like a pro, because i run this type of flagger before, and i know the build, and ive got the skills. all i need to do now is "roll" the damn thing and be in the Guild Hall hop on the last spot and run that flag like ive never run before!

i dont need to spend x hours raising him up to max level, getting an armor set with all of the right insignias, and runes, and the right weapon and off-hand sets,(which ill need atleast 4 different sets of for different attackers/spells) and make sure ive got all the right skills....

In GW I can hone my skills in whatever I want. The PvP'ers in GW in the top 100 are amazing. The Monks(healers) spend months learning how to position themselves, when to use what skills, learning bars(skills) learning their team's movements, etc,etc.

Guild Wars PvP isn't just a place to fight others. It is a sport. Skill, Practice, and hard work are all needed to be good.

I get the feeling that WoW PvP is just a place to show off your new weps/armor/poon a scrub 10 levels lower than you. Which I am also proud to say, that within the Battle Isles you must be max level to fight. So no "pwningz uv scrubz!!!" unless they are a scrub at heart and run a fag Warrior/Monk with Mending thinking they won't get demolished within the first 3 seconds of a match because they have 3 extra "bips" of Regen!!!

fucking scrubs...

 

[sapient]

WoW's battlegrounds are objective based and on set level parameters.

That isn't to say it's not hopelessly shallow - every class has a set routine vs another class, and it seems that the game is set in concrete. A warrior walks up to a frost mage, clicks a few buttons, then dies. The frost mage sits around with Deep Wounds ticking, then gets healed by a passing druid. A warrior is gouged by a rogue, clicks a few buttons, the rogue dies and the warrior has Garotte ticking. God help you if you try to 2vs1, because it's concrete whether you'll die or not vs class x or whether class y will screw up, because the error space for every class is so blisteringly huge you can fuck up your routine 4-5 times and still win.

PvP in WoW is epic fail.

 

[PhoenixFlame]

D'oh for my internet failing so I couldn't respond to this sooner.

I know a lot of people who dislike WoW and have played it extensively. In case someone says I can't quantify my disdain for it, I played from beta 2, into release to roughly just before TBC came out. I was in a raiding guild which defeated Naxxramas and was in the top 5 guilds of my server.

I don't "hate" WoW. But I definitely dislike it. Someone touched upon this already, but raiding is a chore and a job. It's the carrot on the stick that keeps people playing but when it becomes a necessary means to an end, that's when I start having problems.

My main issues with the game surround the change in game design from beta in being PvE and PvP even-handed to being a PvE-grinding game, and the awful community management and service. Now, I know since I left, changes have been made to make PvP advancement viable - however, they aren't enough to convince me that the game itself has trivialized all the previous content (1-60, which was actually well-developed) in favor of an endless endgame crafted to reward only a small percentage of the population rather than providing everyone with a generally fun experience.

In addition, I believe Blizzard has the resources to manage their community a little better, but refuse to do so. Anyone who has ever spent time on the WoW forums knows it is the worst cesspool of immaturity and unproductive posting since Bnet kiddies was a hot term. The maddening thing is that productive posts and thoughtful feedback is buried underneath the mountain of rickrolls, "lol" posts, and general flames and trolls. I'm aware of the extreme expense to keep a game like this running, but surely some concentration on fixing community tools would help in the long run.

As to the general subject, the best comparison I can make when it comes to WoW is restaurants. WoW is like Mcdonald's. A lot of people dislike McDonald's because of its unhealthy disposition and mass produced food. But a lot of people patronize McDonald's - millions, even billions - because it is convenient, easy, and generally, good tasting. This does not mean that McDonald's is the best hamburger you will ever have - it's simply the easiest and quickest hamburger you will find. Certain concessions are made so that this is the case - take a quick peek behind the counter at a McDonald's next time and watch how the production cycle is nothing like you might find in your own home or even at another restaurant. McDonald's has been an easy target for a lot of folks (see: lawsuits over hot coffee and making people fat, or the documentary "Super Size Me"), but it is clearly successful as a business model.

The key thing with McDonald's is - it isn't the only hamburger in town. And neither is WoW. WoW just happens to be the easiest and most prominent hamburger to eat at the moment.

 

[Eudaemonian]

I think the description of a "set routine" is kind of... broad. Yes, healers will heal, damages will damage. I don't think that's really rigid enough to define as a routine. Classes interact in a somewhat RPS fashion, if RPS had 8 classes with different specs of each that turn out different ways. Nowadays, your gear is almost more determinative than your class. If certain classes weren't good vs others (not all of which I think has been a part of explicit design, but rather emergent) what would be the alternative? Even if it weren't a class system X would have to be good against something... if not a class, then a type of armor, or style of play, and it would eventually be the same RPS system.

I hate WoW PvP, but that's for completely different reasons than everyone's more philosophical arguments. I'm bad at it. I don't play an RPG for tense frothy-mouthed twitching against another person. Not to mention you lose by default at this point if you haven't been pvping to get the grossly ridiculous pvp gear which gives you more stamina than god.

 

[sebboh]

edit: this post was probably unacceptable